Most of us agree that we live in an attention deficit world and it’s not surprising we feel that way. Imagine yourself walking into a room about to share a plan that will put potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in the pockets of a sales team. This hot new business area is key to both the attendee’s commission check and your company’s success. You look out at the audience and as people come into the room, they sit down, open their laptops and put mobile phones next to them.

Late last evening I received a text from a teammate that read, "I'm not available, Sorry." Obviously this doesn't appear to be weird on the surface, but there is more to the story. This colleague is three time zones away and we are in the middle of several important projects. The interesting thing is that this text didn't align with any text conversation. Scratching my head, I texted back "????" assuming she would explain that she sent it by mistake.

“Hello my name is ... and welcome to the Advanced Sales Techniques Workshop. Let’s take a look at what our objectives are today.” How many times have you heard this opening, whether it was for an "in-person" training or for a virtual presentation? While this one way to open a workshop, it’s not a compelling way to capture your audience.

At our company, evoke, we moved to be a strictly virtual team in 2010. As a result, our mission is to help companies move toward a virtual environment in both training and collaboration. Just a few days ago, I returned from our most recent face-to-face team meeting. We recommend that you do these twice a year. However, for a number of "excuses" that I won't give, it had been 18 months since our last face-to-face ... and it showed. Sometimes "the cobblers' children go without shoes" and that's a lessoned learned for us!